I men­tion it because one of the defens­es of his insen­si­tiv­i­ty (to put it mild­ly) was that his argu­ment was log­i­cal­ly sound. And that’s a point that gets brought up an awful lot in dis­cus­sions of social jus­tice and in gen­er­al when some­one is called out for doing some­thing harm­ful. It’s espe­cial­ly a point brought up from men against women, usu­al­ly as a way of gas-light­ing us and say­ing, “You’re too emo­tion­al to get this, let me log­ic at you in a man­ly fash­ion.” It’s sex­ist, it’s dis­mis­sive, and it focus­es on one aspect of a sit­u­a­tion to the exclu­sion of all else.

As I said on Twit­ter in my orig­i­nal thoughts about Dawkins’ ass­hat­tery:

This is the kind of argu­ment I see quite a lot from those who tend to hold a lot of priv­i­lege & expe­ri­en­tial igno­rance of the top­ic at hand. Honestly…it makes me think of that scene in the RDJ/Jude Law Sher­lock Holmes. Holmes is hold­ing some­thing in his hand, the end of which is mere inch­es from Watson’s face. Wat­son: “Get that thing out of my face.” Holmes replies, “It’s not in your face, it’s in my hand.” That’s what these log­i­cal men are like. That’s their argu­ment. TECHNICALLY, they’re right. But the prac­ti­cal appli­ca­tion & obser­va­tion of the sit­u­a­tion shows that one can be cor­rect but still wrong. In this sit­u­a­tion, the argu­ment can (& has been, repeat­ed­ly) made that Dawkins wasn’t min­i­miz­ing when he was mak­ing the com­par­i­son. TECHNICALLY, he wasn’t. But func­tion­al­ly, he was. Just like the thing TECHNICALLY was in Holmes’ hand but FUNCTIONALLY was in Watson’s face.

(If you’re unfa­mil­iar with Cliff Pervocracy’s miss­ing stair anal­o­gy and don’t want to click the link above, he basi­cal­ly out­lines that often com­mu­ni­ties gloss over abusers in their midst the way that some­one who lives in a house with a miss­ing stair just becomes accus­tomed to skip­ping that step rather than fix­ing it.)

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